"It makes people funnier" is just one of the many benefits, apparently

China has had some serious issues with smog lately, to the point of closing schools and delaying or canceling flights. But the Chinese media has put quite a spin on these recent problems with pollution, insisting that there are five benefits to choking on the air you breathe.

According to Yahoo News, China's state broadcaster CCTV attempted to shine some absurd light on the smog situation by listing five reasons as to why this air pollution is beneficial. The list is as follows:

It unifies the Chinese people.

It makes China more equal.

It raises citizen awareness of the cost of China's economic development.

It makes people funnier.

It makes people more knowledgeable (of things like meteorology and the English word 'haze').

This list is one of the more imaginative spins seen on a poor situation. Not even former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf can top this one.

China's smog problem has certainly escalated in recent weeks, and since the country is trying to make Shanghai in particular a hub for new business, this air pollution isn't doing it any favors.

Last week, hundreds of flights were delayed or cancelled in Shanghai on Friday alone, citing record levels of air pollution.

Schools were affected as well, as hazardous air pollution forced them to shut down or cancel outdoor activities in at least two cities in eastern China on Thursday. Some schools cancelled outdoor activities on Friday, too.

The Shanghai government issued its most severe health warning last Friday afternoon when the city's pollution index ranged between 23 times and 31 times the levels recommended by international health officials.

The Shanghai government said the level of PM2.5 particulate matter reached 466 on Friday, which is categorized as "severely polluted."

China's smog problem [Image Source: Sensible Reason]

PM2.5 particulate matter involves small particles in the air that are the most hazardous to health.

The U.S. Consulate in Shanghai took a reading of a whopping 503.

This is definitely not good news, as the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends no more than a reading of 20 as a daily level. Anything over 300 is labeled hazardous.

The Chinese government has said that it would battle the smog problem, but its efforts don't appear to be working too well.

In a recent Reuters report, the United States offered to help China crack down on vehicle emissions in order to combat the air pollution situation. More specifically, the U.S. said it would offer technical assistance to create a new round of vehicle emissions standards -- known as China VI -- which would require cars to have filters that capture particulate matter.

This could be a helpful step in fighting smog, considering the fact that China's Ministry of Public Security said passenger car ownership in China reached 120 million by the end of 2012, and will top 200 million by 2020 at the current growth rate.

However, China V standards for diesel and refined gasoline will be the next to be introduced, and they will not take effect until 2017. But the good news is that the standards will lower the sulfur content limit to 10 parts per million.

The most recent reports on Chinese air pollution are certainly not the first. Back in July of this year, a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that heavy pollution in northern China causes citizens in that area to have lower lifespans than those in the south. In fact, the study says that the 500 million people who live north of the Huai River will lose 2.5 billion years of life expectancy because of air pollution. Breaking it down further, each northerner has a 5.5-year drop in life expectancy compared to southerners.

Whether a lobbyist successfully gets a law changed, or the government simply does it without proper democratic process.... the reality is that its the very small and greedy few, are ENSLAVING and abusing the greater populace for profit, and control.

How is communism worse than the NSA listening to your phone calls for no reason?

Why is ok for an oil spill to wipe out the coastline and go back to business like nothing happened meanwhile a single mother can be sued for millions cuz she shared some song files?

WHY IS IT OK FOR THE FEDERAL RESERVE TO JUST PRINT MONEY WHEN IT NEEDS IT?

OH BY THE WAY BLAME "WALL STREET" FOR THE SUB PRIME MESS BUT NOBODY WAS HOLDING A GUN TO ANYONES HEAD FORCING PEOPLE TO BORROW MORE MONEY THAN THEY COULD AFFORD TO PAY BACK.

GREED. GREED. GREED.

LOOK IN THE MIRROR.

Why does a terroist attack in new york justify the errosion of the basic rights and freedoms that FOUNDED YOUR NATION. It doesnt, if anything it should make you fight for them even harder.

It is not the responsibility of the "president" to protect your life or save your country from the toilet america is swirling.

IT IS UP TO YOU

THE MORE YOU BORROW, THE MORE YOU OWN, THE MORE YOU HAVE TO LOSE AND THE MORE CONTROL GOVERNMENTS AND CORPORATIONS HAVE OVER YOU.

FROM EDUCATION TO THE SUPERMARKET THE AMERICAN POPULATION IS ENSLAVED WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING IT.

You guys had it right in the american revolution, you were willing to FIGHT TO THE DEATH in order to do the right thing.

And now look at you:

warm safe at home reading this on your precious ipad and and boo hoo OMG paul walker died how sad!!!!!

Your country is going broke.

The rich are going to get richer, and the poor are going to get poorer and the system of control you were born into and have supported every single day of your life will continue until EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN gets off their ass says enough is enough.

ITS NOT OK TO SPYITS NOT OK TO GENETICALLY CONTROL THE FOOD SUPPLYITS NOT OK CENSOR OR CONTROL ACCESS TO THE INTERNET OR INFORMATION IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM

Seriously, if you had to picture "evil communism" wouldnt those three things be at the top of the list????

Go watch the movie "sneakers" its an old robert redford movie, all the things they fear and fight against in that move are what is part of our daily lives now...systematically weve been desensitized to the point it doesnt matter and it is only going to get worse.

20 years from now america is going to look more and more like a communist state, it already is if when a company that stands to lose profit for one reason or another

I feel ya whole-heartedly on most of your points. A few, however, lack sense.

Printing money is the Federal Reserve's job. They help balance the worth of the dollar both to its previous self (inflation) and to other currencies in a dynamic, unpredictable landscape. When they print money they aren't increasing their wealth. The entirety of American dollars is worth something, and printing more dollars doesn't make the worth of the entirety go up, it makes the worth of each individual dollar go down.

Many Americans do receive multi-billion dollar payouts because they can't pay their rent. Its a cornerstone of the ridiculous amount of money we spend on social services. The reason they can't pay their rent is because the won't. And the reason they won't pay their rent is because they know the government will help pay it for them. Yes, greed, debt, something for nothing, and stealing from the rich to give to the poor are very scary reasons America needs to wake up.

It is perfectly reasonable to genetically modify food. I know this might sound spooky and ccrrraazzy, but humans have been directly genetically modifying their food supply since they first became a part of the chain. It began with the ignorant pressures of hunter-gatherers on their local flora and fauna. This lasted for many thousands of years and had sweeping changes on the genotypes of the consumables.

This transitioned into the cognizance of a generational affectation through animal husbandry and a seasonal affectation on agriculture. Human selection over time yielded quite extreme genetic changes from the parent original.

And now we are at the point where we aren't just molding clay anymore, we are building bricks, and architecting an infinity stymied only by our menial imagination of what we can currently fathom of the incredible wonder of that which is LIFE. Whatever we make still has to compete and be viable, it doesn't exist outside the fierce competition for resources and life in a soil microcosm. It is all evolution, and I am hardly afraid of a rogue "genetically modified" organism ruining an entire ecosystem.

The danger is people who want something for nothing. People who feel entitled to things such as a house, food, or healthcare, or anything for that matter, in the sense that they deserve to have such and such things that someone else would need to produce just because they simply happen to be alive. This process of the haves supporting or carrying the have-nots is mind blowing to me. How can that ever EVER lead to anyone having anything at all?

Communism isn't about regulation, or "control by the government". It's about ownership by government.

Government Regulation: You can't sell food products that you know are unsafe, and do not meet specific standards of safety.

Communism: You will sell these specific food products produced using these methods, at this price, in this amount. We expect this much profit ("Profit" goes back to government, as the government is the business owner).

Again: You really should open an encyclopedia and study up on what communism actually is, if you're going to be using it to describe the United States.

Your notion of communism is interesting, but totally incorrect. There has never been a communist country, and it's not likely that there will ever be one.

What we call communist countries are really socialist countries, even though the ruling parties call themselves communist.

True communism means no government at all. Everyone is doing what they should for their country because they know that's what should be done, and they want to do it. It assumes that people are perfect, and care about everyone else. The part of the definition that matters here is that everyone does what is needed, and receives what they need back. No greed, no hoarding, no individual wealth or power. In other words, an ideal that humans can't possibly meet, a utopia.

I would argue that the term "communism" has been co-opted into also meaning a totalitarian government that owns most or all industry. Many people refer to-and have referred to-the old USSR as communism. Some of these people were heads of state.

Just because it wasn't pure communism as described by Marx, doesn't mean that many of its concepts weren't implemented by these totalitarian governments. They limited the application of communism to their economic structure, and certainly made exceptions to whom even that was applied to, but the many of the major tenets were there.

Not really. The dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to be a transitional stage that cleanses away the evils of the old social and economic order, following which the dictatorship would dissolve as under true Communism there's no need for a big central government imposing its will upon the people. This is going back to the "Commune" in "Communism" -- and realizing that Communism has its philosophical roots in the French communes of the late 19th century:

You are looking at something that has nothing to do with real communism though. They are socialist. Real communism begins with the "withering away of the state". Only once the state (the government) is gone can communism be accomplished.

It doesn't matter what these parties called themselves, or what outsiders called those governments, the weren't communist. The parties themselves weren't interested in promoting the withering away of anything except freedom.

Not communist at all. Idealism such as communism or other economic systems always sound nice at first, until you have to live with it.

China is not a socialist nation (any more). If you can't afford to pay for things like hospital or child care, education, retirement benefits and so on then generally, you don't get them.

If you don't have money, you're as fucked or more in China as in the US for example. Europe is by and large far more socialist than China is, minus the dictatorship, mostly. Unless you live in Belarus, Khazakstan and a few other places (including Russia, arguably.)

Wrong. No government at all = Anarchy. Which, like communism, always leads to dictatorship.

Communism = central planning. Which is where the dictatorship comes in, absolute power corrupts absolutely, so those who plan the whole shindig always come to belive they're just a bit more equal then the rest of the proles.

I will agree communism as it is in theory is the perfect system for perfect human beings. Which is also it's flaw; it refuses to take into account human imperfection. Which is why it'll never work in practice, and you can be sure, both Stalin and Mao have tried to put it into practice in it's purest form. Thousands of communes in russia and millions in china starved because of it.

Kevin Newman Live, a Canadian TV show, recently aired a spot about the US gov't pulling funding from CDC/scientists who want to research or create a database to log all deaths related to guns in the US. Apparently, in the US, you're simply not allowed to track that with government funding. Even in light of all the gun related tragedies that have occurred recently.

quote: 1. Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker:“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

2. Defensive uses of guns are common:“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

3. Mass shootings and accidental firearm deaths account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths, and both are declining:“The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths. Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” The report also notes, “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”

5. Gun buyback/turn-in programs are “ineffective” in reducing crime:“There is empirical evidence that gun turn in programs are ineffective, as noted in the 2005 NRC study Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. For example, in 2009, an estimated 310 million guns were available to civilians in the United States (Krouse, 2012), but gun buy-back programs typically recover less than 1,000 guns (NRC, 2005). On the local level, buy-backs may increase awareness of firearm violence. However, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, guns recovered in the buy-back were not the same guns as those most often used in homicides and suicides (Kuhn et al., 2002).”

6. Stolen guns and retail/gun show purchases account for very little crime:“More recent prisoner surveys suggest that stolen guns account for only a small percentage of guns used by convicted criminals. … According to a 1997 survey of inmates, approximately 70 percent of the guns used or possess by criminals at the time of their arrest came from family or friends, drug dealers, street purchases, or the underground market.”

7. The vast majority of gun-related deaths are not homicides, but suicides:“Between the years 2000-2010 firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.”

Compare gun violence in the US with say, Japan, and then compare the number of guns in citizens' hands in the US and Japan, and you'll find - of course! - that gun violence against ordinary citizens is far, far higher in Japan than in the US, since- wait, what?

It's not, you say?

But how could that be true, if only criminals have guns, then... *head asplodes*

seems like a free culture that is not as tightlocked into following a old book that is 2 centuries old (which as outdated information of everything, favors just certain things.. and the best of all? when they hypocritically blast you for breaking X law,while they break Y law with impunity)

Here's a lesson in government agencies for you. The report you linked to was not from the CDC, it was from the National Academies. This is not a comment on its validity, only that actual source does not serve as evidence for your claim.

Here's the bit that was referenced: "Congress, after all, has long barred the CDC from funding any research that could be used to “advocate or promote gun control.”

Let's put an end to throwing terms around without understanding their meaning. What it really is is Totalitarianism. Just as the soviet system varied from a dictatorship to a totalitarian state. Real communism is still nonsense but it wouldn't even have a government.

Their meaning then, or their meaning now? Popular definition or Websters?

It looks to me like you were picking up what the author of the comment was laying down.

Either way, while I personally don't like it, it seems to be a popular way to run a country. It's funny watching someone condemn it and be ignorant to the fact they are living it. By "funny", I mean "not funny at all."

Its not a culture. Do you think guys over there like it? They suffer from it too, yet they have no choice to do anything about the situation. I am sure ppl had been fed up with what the government (communist party) force on them. The spin is a shame, and in my person opinion the newer generation folks in China generally recognize the central television (CCTV) as a government propaganda machine. It has no credibility at all.